@Economister I fully agree with your point regarding Open Data formats. I recently made the same point here: http://www.adamalthus.com/2010/07/why-regulators-need-to-mandate-open-data-protocols-in-the-cloud/
However, I have to disagree with your point regarding price. When FOSS first came on the scene one of the key arguments put forth was its price advantage over commercial software. Unfortunately that only reinforced how little FOSS proponents understood about the cost structures of enterprise IT.
Whether running your own private data-center or the fabric for a cloud data-center, software is a diminishingly small part of total life-cycle costs. If a OSS cloud fabric happened to be an order of magnitude more efficient than commercial alternatives, allowing you to reduce energy consumption or the number of servers you need to run, then maybe that would be a reason to select it. However, given the amount of R&D and the brains behind todays' best commercial cloud offerings I doubt OSS will ever have that big an advantage.
In the end I think David is right in his view that the fact that some fabric is based on the OSS development model is pretty irrelevant at this stage.
Jonathan
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